After the Indian wars, the Army moved Indians to forts and reservations, and Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, shaped by his service in the fighting and subjugation of Indians, developed a sense of obligation to help them adjust to their new lives. On November 1, 1879, he opened a vocational school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which became known as the Carlisle Indian School. For thousands of Indians, admission there was a great ambition. At its peak, enrollment reached 1200 students from ages ten to twenty-five, who studied academic subjects for half the year and a chosen trade for the other half. Hiram Thorpe strongly supported sending his son Jim there, urging him to show other races what an Indian could do. At Carlisle, the sixteen-year-old Jim Thorpe learned tailoring and entered the world of organized sports. Carlisle produced outstanding American teams, especially in football, and although it could not join a league or conference because it was neither a college nor a university, its Jim Thorpe-led teams of 1911 and 1912 would by modern standards have been regarded as national champions. Their success was especially striking because they had only 250 young men of football age, usually played with no more than two or three substitutes against teams with three full units, averaged no more than 170 pounds at their heaviest, and brought together players from different tribes who spoke different languages. Despite press attention to trick plays, Carlisle won most games with faster line charging, good blocking, deadly tackling, and skilled kicking, and because strong opponents would schedule them only for home games, the team became known as the Nomads of the Gridiron. In 1911, Carlisle defeated the University of Pittsburgh 17-0, with Jim carrying the ball two out of every three times and electrifying 12,000 spectators at Forbes Field by punting from his own 10-yard line, racing downfield, recovering the ball among five Pitt players, breaking away from tacklers, and scoring. Later that season at Harvard in Cambridge, before thirty thousand fans, Thorpe played with a heavily bandaged leg and badly swollen ankle, rushed for 173 yards, and kicked field goals from 13, 43, 37, and 48 yards in a performance Harvard coach Percy Houghton praised as that of a theoretical super player in flesh and blood. In 1911 Carlisle outscored collegiate opponents 298-49 in a twelve-game schedule, and in 1912 outscored fourteen colleges 504-114. An account by Kyle Crichton of Lehigh recalled Carlisle's enjoyment of the game, their laughter on the sidelines, and their plainspoken signals under Jim's direction. The following week in 1912, Carlisle went to West Point and defeated the top-ranked Army team 27-6. A New York Times reporter celebrated Thorpe's extraordinary running, especially a punt return from the Army 45-yard line in which he dodged through the entire team. Army's left halfback, Cadet Dwight D. Eisenhower, said there was no one like him in the world. Not long after Jim Thorpe's school days ended, it was decided that Carlisle had served its purpose, and the school closed on June 30, 1918. Carlisle had won a place in the country's heart, its Indian students had proved to be real All-Americans, and Jim Thorpe had become the symbol of Carlisle.